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Marketing our blog
February 19th, 2007 | 
Author: Initially we just included our blog on the marketing lists for our other sites but quite quickly found out that a lot of places list blogs in a peculiar way or don’t list them at all so we’ve been looking around for other ways to get our blog known.The business of blogging is relatively new and so a lot of places aren’t quite sure what to do with them. Many site directories are set up on the basis that the sites on them are fairly static but that’s one thing that’s definitely not the case with active blogs. They also have the characteristic of being local news in many cases and whilst I’m sure it’ll be quite a while before we get mentioned on a news bulletin we are actually listed on one service which in turn feeds into Reuters, USA Today and FoxNews.
Each time a new entry is added various services such as Feedburner, Technorati and more specialised services like PingOMatic inform all the other news-type services that you’ve done that. The net effect of this is that you get the equivalent of a new listing every time you add an entry which can both produce an immediate flurry of hits on the blog and also helps the more gradual building up of hits from the normal search engines.
What’s also quite different from a normal website is that you get feedback and comments on what you said. For instance, a few weeks back I was speculating as to how many people were reading this blog, I was very surprised to have a reply from the Feedburner people themselves. There’s also much more interaction between the various bloggers than there is between people running up normal websites.
One “problem” with a blog is that you really have no idea how many people are actually reading it. The likes of feedburner return a count as to how many people are potentially subscribed to the blog but that doesn’t count those subscribed directly via the e-mail subscriptions and, on the whole, there doesn’t seem to be any 100% reliable way of counting those who reach entry.
What has really surprised me though is that somehow or other this blog has managed to get into the top 1/2 million blogs already which is pretty good going I think considering that I’ve only been doing it properly for six months or so.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Activities in the south of France
Many people have the view that the south of France is simply somewhere that you go to get a suntan on the beach but there are many other activities here throughout the year.
Whilst many fishermen will call it a day once it gets into October or perhaps November in the UK, in the south of France it’s quite a different picture during the year. This photo was taken in the middle of February with temperatures getting on for 20c which is only disguised by the local habit of wearing Winter clothes when it drops below 30c; those of you from the UK would still be in t-shirts.
It’s a similar story with many of the activities that are considered mainly Summer time persuits in the more northernly areas of Europe. In fact, it’s often too warm to continue with many “Summer” activities when the Summer weather kicks in here. For instance, if your interests are in rambling and cycling then it’s not viable to do those in June or July. This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.New ventures in France
Almost the first thing that people do once they move to France is to look for something else to do. Many people come over with the thought that the income from a few gites will support them into their old age but, sadly, it’s not quite so simple as that. Self-catering just doesn’t seem to be capable of providing enough money to fully support a family and B&B can’t be totally relied on either.So, people branch out. Many of the gite people find that there’s quite a bit of spare time during the week and often start doing odd-jobs for other expats around the area. Others find the allure of the computer a great attraction and once they’ve polished up their website for the nth time they start considering other internet ventures.
Sadly we don’t have quite so much time to spare as the gite people but even so we’ve managed to clock up quite a few website sidelines for ourselves since we’ve been here. The first major one was our thriving B&B and gite listing sites which between them attract getting on for 1500 visitors per day, a number exceeding the number of visitors of many commercial listing sites.
Since then, we’ve separated off our regional guide into the ever expanding Pyrenees Themes and our transport pages into PerpignanFlightsAndCarHire. Of course readers of this column will know that Foreign Perspectives is also growing and branching out with our directory launched in January. Now that we’ve one directory on the go, we are making a start on another and hence the birth of the Whole Earth Directory recently.
Why bother though? Well, it turns out that some people are making a fair amount of money on some of these ventures and it looks quite likely that a friend of ours will be matching his real-world income with his Internet income within the next year or two.
So, if you do move to France, don’t expect your initial job to necessarily provide most of your total income once you’ve been here for a few years.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Free B&B / self-catering listings sites
Just before the peak season last year we thought that we’d try a mailshot to promote our listings sites and fired off a few hundred e-mails.We offer a listing broadly comparable to that from sites that charge around £100 and up and attract a reasonable number of bookings for those listed too which isn’t surprising as we get around 1500 visitors to the site per day at the moment, more than several sites charging around £50 get. However, the word “free” actually put people off and we even received a number of e-mails accusing of being behind some dasterdly and dishonest scheme.So we added an option of paying £29.
Net effect? Well, our take-up on the mailings this time is getting on for 5% (vs 1% on the trial). Funnily enough we haven’t had anyone actually pay the £29 which is OK because we’d prefer that they didn’t but it seems that putting a value on it is enough to persuade people to put their time into adding their information to our listings.
We’re going to stick with the current e-mail and £29 for the remainder of this batch of mailings but are thinking that perhaps we should put the notional charge up to £59 as persumably that would mean the site was twice as valuable and therefore might attract more people. That might sound slightly illogical but it appears to be the way people value a listing. Our notional competitors is a site which we had the chance to buy early last year but didn’t as we couldn’t really put a value on it. Interestingly at the moment, the new owner is firing out e-mails several times per month trumpeting that he has the fastest growing listings site around. That’s probably true, but unfortunately for him almost all of that growth is through his offer of 6 months free. We’ve just recently taken him up on it ourselves but only because it’s free and don’t expect to renew when the offer runs out which is probably the thinking of 99% of people that he’s picked up lately.
We had the benefit of seeing some of the figures behind the site in the course of our negotiations with the former owner and feel fairly confident that the new guy will go bankrupt if he gets a renewal rate from the free offer of anything below 30% or so yet the typical rate is more like 5% which equates to the people who actually get bookings from the site over the free period.
Compared to charging sites, ours naturally have a 100% renewal rate in that once people go on, their membership doesn’t expire. A typical small commercial site has a renewal rate of more like 70% so they have to replace the 30% that they lose each year with new entries. We’re actually growing faster than that and will probably finish this mailshot with around 300+ entries vs 100 or so this time last year.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.When to book a holiday in the south of France
Most people think of the south of France as purely a Summer holiday destination but in reality it’s pretty much an all year round one.The July/August period is probably the very worst time to go to the south on holiday. Temperatures are almost always above 30c and frequently clear 40 which makes for a very exhausting time for many activities. In fact, neither walkers nor cyclists attempt to do anything from about mid-July to the end of August.
Even aside from the heat, you’ll find that the traffic is heavier than the roads are geared up for. We’ve given up trying to get down to some of the beach resorts over most of the Summer as we found that we were sitting an hour or more in traffic and then found that we couldn’t park anywhere when we did get to the resort as there’s so little public transport everyone ends up going in their car. On some peak days, even the motorway grinds to a halt as we reported in August.
If you want the heat it’s still there just outside that peak period and pretty much anytime from April to October is t-shirt weather here most of the time. Aside from Easter and during the grape harvest in September the traffic is very light and you’ll find it relatively easy to get accommodation booked too.
The Autumn is a little peculiar here. Due to the heat in the Summer, most places end up looking rather burnt and the grass only starts to grow again in September. That makes for quite an odd time colour-wise. After the grape harvest in late August/early September the vines start to adopt the normal Autumn colours but at the same time pretty much everything else is starting to grow after the weather cools down a little. This stretches out the Autumn period right into January.
Although the cold season runs from around mid January through to the end of February, calling it the “cold season” is quite misleading as many of those days are t-shirt weather. Unlike in more northern areas of Europe, when it’s sunny here, it’s warm regardless of the time of year. Where you need to be careful is with the altitude as even a few hundred metres can mean the difference between warm (hot even) and very cold. For instance, here at Mas Camps we have had one day of snow in the time that we’ve been here yet just 30 minutes or so to the west is the village of St Paul which generally gets proper Winter weather from around January to March. The boundary is very marked and you can find the western edge of the village in snow whilst the eastern edge is in t-shirt weather.
Anyway, why not think of a short break in the south of France right now to escape the cold and storms in the UK?
This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
